I Almost Missed $52.99 This Week

Dear friend,

Four payments turned up in my account this week, and I almost missed two of them.

Together they came to more than I spent fixing my phone on Monday. I only found the smallest one because I was scrolling back through my banking app hunting for a different one.

So today’s letter says one thing. Money is already turning up, and you are allowed to count it when it does.

For most of this year I have looked at my balance about once a week, on a Sunday night, with one eye shut. I check it the way I check a bruise. I am looking for what left. I almost never go looking for what came in.

This week I went looking for the first time in months, because a bride in Ohio messaged me to say she had paid. I opened the app on Tuesday at 7:40 a.m. to make sure, and then I kept scrolling down past her payment into the rest of the week. There was more there than I expected, and I had no memory of two of the amounts at all.

Here is everything that came in, in order.

Tuesday morning, $70 from the Ohio bride for a custom table sign. She messaged me the night I got the new screen.

Wednesday afternoon, $38 on Venmo from my cousin Dani. It was gas money from the drive to her baby shower in July. I had forgotten she owed me anything.

Wednesday night, $14.99 back from a photo editing app I canceled in August. It charged me again in September anyway. I emailed their support twice and then stopped thinking about it.

Thursday, $31 from Mercari for a stack of blank frames I bought for a craft fair I never went to. A woman in Tulsa bought all six.

$70 plus $38 plus $14.99 plus $31 is $153.99. That is $24.99 more than the $129 I paid for the repair, and it came in over three days.

So here is why the $38 and the $14.99 nearly slipped past me. I told myself it was because I was busy. That is not it. I turned my bank notifications off in March, the week my card declined at Target over a $46 cart of groceries. Every buzz after that felt like bad news, so I made the phone stop buzzing.

Turning them off worked. It also meant the good ones went quiet, and I never noticed the trade. For six months a refund could arrive in my account and sit there without a sound.

Most of the money that reaches me comes in that way, in small amounts with no warning.

These are the three lines I was running, and what I am running now.

There is no homework this weekend. I am not going to ask you to turn your notifications on, check your balance, or add anything up.

Today you get to notice what already came in, if you feel like it. The $5 on CashApp from a friend for coffee is part of it. So is the refund you asked for and forgot, and the one sale on a slow week that covered gas. Noticing it is the whole instruction.

Last night I turned my bank notifications back on. It took about 30 seconds in settings. The first buzz came at 9:12 p.m., and I flinched before I looked. It was $4.50 in cash back from a tank of gas in August. That makes five payments this week, not four.

I am keeping them on through the weekend to see what else turns up. Some of the buzzes will be charges, and I know that. But the Etsy app went off twice this morning before 8 a.m., and I let myself read both before I got out of bed. One of them was a $16 order for a welcome sign.

Keep the door open,

P.S. Dani’s Venmo memo said “finally lol.” I have spent two days deciding whether to tell her I had forgotten she owed me the $38 at all, and I still have not texted her back.